good night, at her father’s door, a dark cloud rapidly arose and obscured the moon, and I became afraid, and ran fleetly home, expecting to meet an assassin at every corner’s turn, but when I heard the cheerful watchman’s cry of “half-past eight o’clock, and all’s well,” and beheld his noble form in the distance, my fears are tranquilized, and I walk as erect and firm as the hero of many battles, and loudly boast of my courage, after I get snugly in the trundle bed with Albert, the shield of my father’s voice above me, to fortify my pretended valor. On the following day, my step-mother struck me on the head with a jacket with brass buttons, for my impudence at dinner in my father’s absence, because she wouldn’t give me more boiled onions, of which I was very fond; the blood flowed freely, and she was terrified lest I would bleed to death, and she be hung; she dressed the wounds most tenderly, and gave me plenty of onions and sugar, and warmly coaxed me not to tell father when he came to tea, lest he would gently chide her for her laceration of the skull of the prolific brain of the darling son who bore his own father’s promising name of Stephen; and for many days she gave me candy and peanuts, and gave me so many onions that I have loathed them since; she even poulticed my lacerated head with boiled onions, which I smell to this day; I had the ear-ache, and she even put a small roast onion in my ear to check the pain; I once passed through Weathersfield, (where onions are as thick as leaves in the Vale of Vallambrosa,) whose atmosphere caused me to fertilize its streets with bile; my step-mother finally stops my supplies of sweetmeats, and I threaten to tell my father of her violent blow, and show him my scars, when she surrendered, and gave me sweet things for a long period; and she saved me many a whipping from my father, when I was mischievous, lest I would tell and show the relics of her trouncing, which gave me a boundless latitude for pranks until the scars all passed away; at this time, my dog Watch was drowned, but he rose the ninth day, and I buried him at the foot of my father’s garden, with funeral honors, a neighboring dog, in traces, bearing his precious body to the grave, over which I placed turf and stones in memory of a dog I dearly loved; after the funeral, Cornelius Snow, nicknamed Flop, called me names, and I told my father that “Flop Snow had called me names, and I meant to lick him for it,” when my father effected a reconciliation, by allowing Cornelius to call me Steve as long as I called him Flop. He had long been at the head of my class, at school, and I had never been at the head, which mortified my father, who told me if I would get above Flop through good spelling, he would give me a sixpence; I tried long and hard, but I couldn’t do it; so, on a very stormy day, while myself and Flop were the only boys of our spelling class at school, I told him that if he would